Tough Break: Aaron Judge Will Miss Time With a Stress Fracture in a Rib

Aaron Judge has been in a slump lately, and what’s more, his right shoulder has been bothering him when he swings the bat. The 34-year-old slugger sat out the Yankees’ three-game series against the Guardians this week after initially being diagnosed with a bone bruise on a right upper rib. On Thursday, after consulting with multiple doctors, including a specialist in thoracic outlet syndrome, the Yankees announced that Judge has been diagnosed with a stress fracture in his right first rib, an injury that will sideline him for several weeks and leave a sizable hole in the New York offense.

According to the Yankees, Judge will require a period of rest and limited activity, and then will undergo re-imaging in four to six weeks — sometime in early-to-mid-July — after which the next steps will be determined. The team added that it does expect Judge to return this season.

Prior to Tuesday, Judge had started all 59 of the Yankees’ games, either in right field (53 times) or at designated hitter (six times). He had been experiencing pain in his right shoulder for some indeterminate amount of time, with the problem particularly affecting his swing during the team’s series in Sacramento this past weekend. He went 2-for-12 with three strikeouts against the A’s, though he did record five hard-hit balls out of the nine he put into play. Perhaps more tellingly, he had homered just twice over the past four weeks, and from May 11–22, went 11 games without a single RBI, the longest such stretch of his career; he had 10-game droughts in 2016, ’19, and ’23. To be fair, Judge’s latest drought owes something to his teammates. The Yankees hit just .214/.306/.363 during that 11-game span, giving him just six plate appearances with runners in scoring position; he went 0-for-5 with a walk.

Manager Aaron Boone told reporters before Tuesday’s game that Judge had been “dealing with some shoulder soreness, just kind of more nagging.” He added, “Then over the weekend, the last couple of games in Sacramento, I think it became a little more than just that, where I noticed with some swings and stuff. It became a little more than just nagging. I think it was affecting him.”

Boone said Judge couldn’t pinpoint a play that caused the injury, and later added that edema (swelling) complicated efforts to diagnose it. The Yankees sent the slugger for multiple rounds of MRI scans, as well as CT scans and X-rays. He met Dr. Chris Ahmad, the team physician, and at least one other specialist, and on Thursday the Yankees revealed that his latest MRI was being reviewed by Dr. Gregory Pearl, a Dallas-based cardiovascular specialist who specializes in cases of thoracic outlet syndrome. TOS, the compression of nerves and/or blood vessels in the area between the neck and shoulder, can cause shoulder and neck pain and numbness in the fingers. It primarily affects pitchers — the Phillies’ Zack Wheeler is the most prominent recent example — but it’s not unheard of in position players, with MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch mentioning Mike Zunino and Jared Walsh as both having been diagnosed with TOS in 2022.

TOS generally requires surgery to remove a rib, so it’s good news that Judge has avoided that scenario, but his own history tells us he’s not out of the woods when it comes to an extended absence. Judge suffered a stress fracture of the same right first rib — as well as a partially collapsed lung — while diving for a ball on September 18, 2019. He missed just two of the Yankees’ final nine regular season games and continued to play through the injury during the postseason, but the fracture hadn’t fully healed. As Hoch reported, “[H]ad the pandemic-shortened ‘20 season started on time, he would have been on the injured list until June.”

This is Judge’s second time in the past three seasons landing on the IL. He was healthy for all of 2024, then spent 10 days sidelined last July and August due to a flexor strain in his right arm, an injury that prevented him from playing right field for a month and limited the intensity of his throws thereafter. His last extended absence was in 2023, when he missed 54 days, from early June to late July, after spraining his right big toe in a collision with the Dodger Stadium outfield wall.

Judge is currently hitting .248/.375/.533 and is tied with teammate Ben Rice for fourth in the AL in home runs (17) while ranking sixth in slugging percentage, and tied for seventh in wRC+ (150). Those numbers would be impressive for just about any other player, but Judge is coming off a season in which he hit .331/.457/.688 (204 wRC+) with 53 homers and 10.1 WAR while winning his third AL MVP award. Hell, he’s coming off a four-season stretch in which he’s slashed .311/.439/.677 (204 wRC+) while averaging 53 homers and 9.3 WAR, putting him the stratosphere of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Barry Bonds in terms of sustained offensive performance.

Judge has rarely approached those heights in 2026. He hit .252/.381/.622 (175 wRC+) through the end of April but dipped to .243/.368/.437 (122 wRC+) in May, still more than respectable and better than his .207/.340/.414 (116 wRC+) showing in March/April 2024 before he absolutely went off. He hasn’t had a month with a wRC+ below 100 in which he recorded at least 60 plate appearances since August 2017 (91 wRC+).

That said, within the month of May, Judge’s production took a steep drop immediately following his best stretch of the season. He hit four homers and batted a very Judge-like .314/.478/.686 (207 wRC+) from May 1–10, at which point he had a 183 wRC+ through 41 games, the first quarter of the season. Since then, he’s hit .206/.304/.309 (77 wRC+) in 18 games. Some of that drop-off could be regression or bad luck rather than injury, but if I use May 11 as a point of inflection — grouping everything before that into one period and everything from that date forward into another — a few issues do come into focus, helping to explain the slump if not necessarily identifying when he sustained his injury. For one thing, while he’s been swinging just as hard, if not harder, lately, his attack angle has flattened out:

Overall, his bat speed has been down relative to the past two seasons, and he’s not reaching 75 mph on his swing as often; he has done so more often during this slump, but only by a few percentage points. All of that may be out of an effort to curb his strikeout rate, which was a comparatively high 29.0% through May 10, up from 23.6% last year; he cut that to 23.8% during this slump. More interesting to these eyes is that his attack angle has lately been a few degrees lower than in 2024 or ’25, and that his attack direction is slightly less pull-oriented (negative numbers = pull). With that in mind, here are his results on contact:

Through May 10, Judge’s average exit velocity was already down more than 1 mph from last year, but his barrel and hard-hit rates were both in line with his 2024–25 numbers. Since then, while his average launch angle has only decreased slightly, his barrel rate is less than half of his rate through the first quarter of the season, and his expected slugging percentage is down 224 points, with his actual slugging percentage another 138 points below that. While he’s pulling the ball only a little less often than before, lately he’s been hitting it much more on the ground, and his pulled air rate has absolutely plummeted:

Again, the data above helps to explain why Judge’s production has diminished in recent weeks, but I’ve merely pointed out correlation, not causation. Combing through MLB.com highlights from the past month, I noticed a couple of plays where Judge’s right shoulder made some contact, once with the padded Yankee Stadium outfield wall while making a great catch against the Orioles on May 3, and once when he landed hard after diving for a ball against the Rays on May 24. Neither lines up exactly with Boone’s observations or the statistics above, however, but we are talking about a stress fracture, something caused by repetitive or cumulative action rather than a single instance of trauma.

It’s an understatement to say that the Yankees have no easy way to replace Judge. While their offense leads the AL in both scoring (5.08 runs per game) and wRC+ (114), it’s largely been Judge, Rice (.300/.393/.638, 181 wRC+), and Cody Bellinger (.273/.373/.468, 136 wRC+) doing the heavy lifting, with Trent Grisham (.212/.331/.379, 104 wRC+), José Caballero (.259/.315/.394, 101 wRC+), and Jazz Chisholm Jr. (.238/.313/.393, 99 wRC+) their other regulars around league average. Both Paul Goldschmidt (.276/.360/.528, 148 wRC+) and Amed Rosario (.261/.297/.511, 119 wRC+) have been quite productive as the short halves of platoons, but third baseman Ryan McMahon, Rosario’s partner, and the catching tandem of Austin Wells and J.C. Escarra have been sinkholes on the offensive side.

With both Jasson Domínguez and Giancarlo Stanton currently on the injured list, the Yankees outfield has been thinned out to the point that utilitymen Caballero, Rosario, and Max Schuemann have combined to make 20 appearances (but just five starts) at the corners. The team is recalling 25-year-old lefty-swinging prospect Spencer Jones to take Judge’s spot, though his first taste of the majors last month didn’t go so well. Jones is a 45+ FV prospect renowned for his 6-foot-7, 240-pound stature and his plus-plus raw power. He hit a combined .274/.362/.571 (153 wRC+) with 35 homers and 29 steals at Double-A Trenton and Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre last season, but he struck out 35.4% of the time and had just a 60.5% contact rate between the two stops. In 27 plate appearances for the Yankees in May, he hit .167/.259/.167 with a 44.4% strikeout rate.

Judge’s injury could be Jones’ chance to assert himself in the majors, but Domínguez isn’t far from a return. After hitting a modest .257/.331/.388 (103 wRC+) with rough defense in left field last year (-7 DRS, -9 FRV), the 23-year-old switch-hitter spent the first month of this season in Triple-A while the Yankees gave a look to the since-released Randal Grichuk. Domínguez batted just .200/.250/.367 in 32 plate appearances before spraining his left AC joint running into an outfield wall on May 7. He’s slated to begin a minor league rehab assignment on Friday, and once he’s back, he’ll likely serve as the starting left fielder against righties, with Grisham in center and Bellinger in right. With shortstop Anthony Volpe back from offseason surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder and hitting at a league average-ish clip (.220/.339/.340, 99 wRC+) so far, the Yankees can use the versatile, righty-swinging Caballero as a platoon partner for Domínguez in left field. Biting the bullet with McMahon’s offense against lefties and Rosario’s outfield defense in any context is a less palatable alternative.

Stanton, who played the outfield in 20 games last year but had yet to appear there this season, hit .256/.302/.422 (103 wC+) with three homers before suffering a right calf strain on April 24. While he may bypass a rehab assignment because he’s been able to resume hitting indoors, Boone already said that he won’t be activated during the team’s June 8–14 road trip. The Yankees have been playing both Rice and Goldschmidt in the same lineup against righties more frequently than they should, as the latter has just an 81 wRC+ against them since the start of 2024.

On Thursday night, YES Network researcher and booth statistician James Smyth posted a comparison of the Yankees’ performance with and without Judge since 2017. Here it is, all dressed up:

That’s still pretty respectable. At 37-25, the Yankees own the AL’s second-best record and are just half a game behind the Rays (36-23) in the AL East standings. In a league with just five teams playing at .500 or better, their Playoff Odds barely budged with the downward adjustment of Judge’s playing time, falling from 98.1% to 97.4% despite their victory over the Guardians on Thursday. Assuming they get Judge back sometime later this summer, they will probably be fine thanks primarily to the quality of their pitching, and they’ll have the opportunity to shop for lineup reinforcements as the August 3 trade deadline approaches. Still, it’s a major bummer to see one of the game’s stars sidelined for a spell, and while it will likely mean a new AL MVP this year — Bobby Witt Jr., are you ready for your close-up? — this isn’t the way anyone wanted it to happen.